Modes in WiFi

I have a home WiFi LAN which works fine;
but I was just trying to link to my grand-daughter's Sony PSP,
and the latter did not see my LAN,
although it found an access point in a neighbour's house.

I gave the correct ESSID and WEP codes for my LAN.

I'm just wondering if I have my LAN set up in the proper (or standard) way.

I don't have an Access Point;
my desktop has a PCI/PCMCIA adaptor with a WiFi card in it,
while my latop has a PCMCIA WiFi card -
both actually classic Orinoco Gold cards.

My desktop is running in Ad-Hoc mode,
while my laptop is running in Managed mode.
Is that the normal setup?

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Timothy Murphy <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:

> I don't have an Access Point;

I have, and my access point is configured to accept connections from a
few explicitely given MAC addresses only. Maybe your setup has a
similar security setting?

--
Maurizio Loreti http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/mlo.html
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Padova, Italy ROT13: (E-Mail Removed)

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I have a home WiFi LAN which works fine;
> but I was just trying to link to my grand-daughter's Sony PSP,
> and the latter did not see my LAN,
> although it found an access point in a neighbour's house.
>
> I gave the correct ESSID and WEP codes for my LAN.

Whenever having problems, turn off WEP and run in the clear. WEP is
not much use anyway except to slow down someone joining/working in a
SS. Also make note of _how_ your neighbor's working wlan is set up so
you can duplicate it if needed.

> I'm just wondering if I have my LAN set up in the proper (or standard) way.
>
> I don't have an Access Point;

Then you should not have/need an ESSID which if for infrastructure
(managed) mode with an AP.

> my desktop has a PCI/PCMCIA adaptor with a WiFi card in it,
> while my latop has a PCMCIA WiFi card -
> both actually classic Orinoco Gold cards.

Well, having the same (or nearly same) cards in both may help to
automagically configure a setup that is not really "correct" and work
despite your misconfiguration. Been a while since I've worked with any
of these Orinoco cards. You do mean Orinoco Classic Gold, right?

> My desktop is running in Ad-Hoc mode,

Which implies that there is no AP to locate and that the nodes will
share the burden of maintaining management functions to sustain
inter-node communication.

> while my laptop is running in Managed mode.

Which implies that your laptop is expecting/looking for an AP in order
to join an ESS rather than a BSS. IIRC some work was done to get the
classic (hermes?) chipset to work as a (host)AP, but I doubt you are
using such a driver. Are you?

> Is that the normal setup?

Probably not is my guess. ;-)

To really know what is going on we/you would need to know _exactly_
which chipset the cards are using as well as which drivers are loaded.
Labels and model names mean practically nothing -- that's zero, zip,
nada -- re: the hardware used. Presumably these have the same/similar
hardware as the "original" Orinoco Golds (hermes?).

You've also said very little about _how_ you were trying to get the
Sony recognized. Was setting the ESSID and WEP key all you did? Mode?

Since you don't have an AP why don't you just try running everything in
AdHoc mode and see if that works. Knowing Sony, they do absolutely
nothing to aid a set up that is not _exactly_ in accord with
expectations -- ie., the set up is exactly correct and may work or it
is just the tiniest bit "incorrect" and appears dead as a door nail.

good luck,
prg